the hardware it was run on. I was right there The tessellation is that much better on the 'unreleased' hardware (which I also got to see as I was with nVidia in the hotel room setting it all up the day before).

It's the same demo.
Sadly the art in the demo is quite bad and the fact that everything is shiny makes it look even worse.

If they would have made it look more natural the feel would have been a lot better.

Pretty much this. DX11 is DX11... both cards support it fully and so one card would look exactly like the other. there is nothing special in endless city for the 580.

It is a descent demo, it really shows off how you can make tessellation do pretty much anything. Tess elation makes up all the artistic nature and features of the buildings, everything else is a flat polygon.

Alas when you get it up close and high res, you find that the demo isn't exactly a tour de force, texture resolutions are iffy, and alot of features are just repeated over and over from one building to the next.

But thats what most tech demos are. Its a small time project designed to show off specific abilities of the video card with no where near the number of people nore the budget of todays games.

The 2 most impressive demo's I have seen lately is Heaven and Epic Citadel. Why are they so awesome? Heaven was created to show off and sell a companies 3d engine, and epic citadel was not only to show off epics iOS 3d engine (which they sell), but it is using the art from a game they plan to release soon on the iOS platform.

All of you, who think it looks bad or it repeats, the answer is simple. Read the description.

Quote:

• Tessellation enables a continuous ramp on the level of detail, more than doubling the total triangle count and providing up to a 500x increase in detail on the nearest objects.
• Three dimensional displacement maps allow greater detail than simple height maps.
• The demo positions and renders over 600 million triangles per second with a single GPU.
• The city is procedurally generated. The buildings are constructed from a small set of objects into a city of complex structures using a set of rules called an L-system.
• In the area surrounding the viewer, over a million meshes are arranged by the L-system, including roughly 500,000 light sources.
• As the viewer moves, the demo endlessly (hence the name) generates more of the city to keep the viewer surrounded by buildings.
• The L-system randomly selects elements to assemble so each block looks different from the last but if you return to a place you saw before, it’ll regenerate the same buildings you saw previously.
• Split screen rendering modes operate in eye space so they look correct in 3D Vision.
• Screen-space ambient occlusion enables high quality shading on randomly generated and dynamic geometry which cannot be accomplished with precomputed texture maps.
• Dynamic lighting on everything; can shift from day to night.

Also, it's pretty obvious, that the small objects used in the demo to build the structures have low details for a reason. Tessellation looks more impressive that way. The tech demo is all about the future, where developers don't have to spend so many resources on the details, because tessellation will do it for them, thus making everything cheaper.

The city is simply amazing. Not so much the textures and lighting but the sheer number of triangles - unbelievable and unexpected. The auto-tessellation smoothly generates more triangles but with a good level of detail, I can't see any LOD changes at all, no click-click LOD changing but instead absolutely smooth triangle rendering

I have had an account for years....read it all for years...and now I need something answered

I installed EndlessCity but it gives me endless lockups....endlesscity64.exe has stopped responding
It only locks up when I used the mouse or keyboard to "fly"...when I do nothing, it just sits there without crashing.